So there was no question of going to see The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd but the fact remained that though this was a play it was also a play by D. H. Lawrence who I am very interested in, in whom I now have what might be termed a vested interest. Lawrence, in other words, as is the case with all things in which I am interested, is primarily a source of stress and anxiety, is even intruding on that lovely lacuna of disinterest and indifference, the theatre.
But that, of course, is why I was interested in writing a book about Lawrence: to enable me to pass into the realm of complete disinterest. Lawrence said that one sheds one’s sickness in books; I would say that one sheds one’s interest. Once I have finished this book on Lawrence, depend upon it, I will have no interest in him whatsoever. One begins writing a book about something because one is interested in that subject; one finishes writing a book in order to lose interest in that subject: the book itself is a record of this transition.
If I didn’t write this book I would probably go on being interested in Lawrence for the rest of my days. He would gnaw away at me. I would always be curious about Women in Love, would always be thinking to myself, ‘Ah maybe today I will re-read Women in Love’, would always be looking out for new books about Lawrence, would always be making notes about Lawrence or thinking that I might one day write a book about him, whereas once I have finished this book — if I can force myself to retain interest in Lawrence for long enough to complete it — Lawrence will become a closed book for me. That’s what I look forward to: no longer having anything to do with Lawrence.
When nothing interests you any longer, I think to myself, looking at the place on the shelves which will one day be occupied by my book which is intermittently about Lawrence, then you can stop writing and be happy: then you can despair.
First, though, I had to go to Taos to try to make up for that earlier, post-Oaxaca failure to get there.
In 1926, unable to face the exertion of the journey from Europe, Lawrence had declared that ‘it would be marvellous if one could just fly over to New Mexico’; seventy years on, we did exactly that. Or inexactly that: we flew to San Francisco where I would love to live, where Laura grew up, and where, within days of arriving, we vowed we would live, one day. Laura was especially pleased to be back in California: it gave her a chance to practise her Spanish.
We were not sure how to get from San Francisco to Taos, whether to hire a car in San Francisco and drive all the way to Taos and back, or to fly to Las Vegas and then hire a car. It was a difficult decision. In principle we should have driven: that way we would be travellers like Lawrence and Frieda, real people passing through real places; if we flew we would be passengers, suspended in the non-place of the pressurised cabin. Besides, I liked driving in America, was looking forward to driving. The problem was that Laura couldn’t drive and though I was looking forward to doing lots of driving I was also worried about doing too much driving and thereby changing the pleasure of driving into the chore of driving so that by the time we got to Taos it was quite possible that I would be heartily sick of driving. We had heard of absurdly cheap tickets to Vegas, fares designed to lure punters to the casinos, but when we called the airlines these fares were not available. We had heard of ‘companion fares’ to Vegas but these also were unavailable. All available fares to Vegas were unavailable. That should have settled it: the fact that it was not practical to fly to Vegas should have meant that we drove to Taos but because arranging flights was proving so awkward I became determined to fly. We eventually made reservations for Albuquerque but then, having worried that the drive from San Francisco was too long, I became worried that I wouldn’t do enough driving and so we decided, finally, to fly to Salt Lake City — a place neither of us had any desire to go — and take a circuitous, logic-free drive to Taos.
As we flew over Nevada, a cloud printed an ink-blot shadow, exactly the shape of the British Isles, on the arid nothingness below.
Unused to driving and unsure about the handling of our rental car, I was, as Laura wrote in her account of her trip — her ‘memoirs’ as she liked to refer to them — ‘nervous’ as we struggled to navigate our way out of the airport. ‘Nervous’, in this context, meant uptight, prone to erupt in anger at the slightest difficulty — and there were many difficulties since Laura, for all her linguistic skills, has no sense of direction and is, consequently, a very poor navigator. ‘After much quarrelling,’ she wrote later, ‘we managed to find our way out of Salt Lake City and drive south-west through Utah’ — ‘south-west’, in this context, meaning ‘south-east’.
We spent the night in Moab where, having ended one day with an unappetising dinner, we began the next with a foul breakfast. Of the two of us, I am not sure who came out worse: even though I don’t like eggs, I ordered eggs and got eggs; Laura ordered fresh fruit and was served canned peaches. Still, we were up early, the sky was perfect — three snow-streak clouds over the horizon — and, after much scanning, we had found a classic rock station on FM. It was a sealed experience: driving along the highway, listening to songs on the radio about roaring along the highway, listening to the radio.
By lunchtime we were driving through the massive undisappointment of Monument Valley.
‘Cinema,’ I said.
‘CinemaScope,’ corrected Laura.
Across the border, in Arizona, we joined the perpetual rush-hour of tour buses, R.V.s, cars and campers crawling nose-to-tail through the Grand Canyon. We stayed just long enough to satisfy the need to have seen the Grand Canyon, to be able to say that we had seen the Grand Canyon — which I had seen before — and pressed on to Flagstaff. It was a relief to be back in the tranquillity of a city after the clamour and near gridlock of the Canyon but we were once again faced with a wretched dinner — ‘G. had a fit, as usual’ — that I found difficult to stomach.
The next day we were up even earlier than usual, heading east through the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest. We stopped there, at a spot called Agate Bridge, just as I had done six years previously in the middle of a long drive across America, and stood in the place I had stood before. At the time it had been a major detour, driving through Arizona, but I had decided it was worthwhile because there was so little chance of ever finding myself in this part of the world again. If I was ever going to drive through the Painted Desert, I had reasoned, this was the time to do it. And now, six years later, I had driven through the Painted Desert again, had come to the same spot I had been in six years previously — and I had done so precisely because I had stood here before. Strange, the pleasure derived from revisiting a place. It has nothing to do with getting to know an area better or more thoroughly; all that counts is the simple physical fact of having been in the same spot before. I have stood here before, I thought to myself as I stood there surrounded by the same stripes of colour, the same silence, am once again filling the space that has remained empty throughout the long years of my absence. It was as if a meeting had taken place, a rendezvous. In Taormina, outside the Fontana Vecchia, I had tried to enhance my responsiveness to the place by reminding myself that I was standing where Lawrence had stood, was seeing the things he had seen. It hadn’t worked. But here, in the Painted Desert, I was moved by the fact that I was standing in the place I had stood, was seeing the things I had seen. They were of no consequence, these thoughts, but I thought them. And if, at that moment, I had been asked who I was I would have replied unhesitatingly: I am the person who stood here six years ago. What I didn’t wonder, as I stood there again, was if I would ever stand here again. Each time we leave places like this, in remote parts of the world, we do so for the last time.